Almost any movie made about Vietnam is sure to be a hellish experience and seem like a very brutal film. The war itself was so bad that most men that came back were never the same and didn’t want to talk about their experiences. Platoon is arguably one of the best Vietnam films ever made, and it’s images were considered highly disturbing to some and in many ways unreal to others. The drama of it was such that it has been considered to be one of the more meaningful movies of its time and is still greatly remembered today.
Chances are though there might be a few things that people missed.
10. Oliver Stone became so exhausted that started blaming people for some of the most outlandish things.
He spent so much time on the set that he became exhausted and started making weird accusations, such as blaming one of his editors for hiding footage he hadn’t shot yet.
9. They used imported dirt.
Since they filmed in the Philippines the dirt wasn’t quite the right color so they had to import dirt from Vietnam.
8. Everyone was actually high in the scene where the soldiers were getting high.
By the time the scene was actually shot they were all coming down so the effect was kind of wasted.
7. There was almost no movie thanks to a revolution.
When the current president of the country was being ousted it created about a week of delays so that Stone could learn who he had to pay for permission to film in the jungle.
6. This was Johnny Depp’s first time out of country.
He’s a world traveler as of now but back then he’d never set foot out of the US.
5. Getting the film produced took over a decade.
Stone tried desperately to get someone to push the movie forward but was preempted by The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now to start with.
4. Al Pacino almost got Charlie Sheen’s role.
You get the feeling that Taylor would have been a little more animated if Pacino had actually taken the role.
3. It put a new spin on how Hollywood looked at war.
Stone managed to retain the services of a retired Marine and as a result managed to get a much better level of depth to his movie that many war movies had never managed to show. This gave Hollywood a new look into the hidden scenes behind the war that most people never knew about.
2. The entire cast had to go through boot camp.
In short they had to act enough like soldiers that they finally understood the reality of what the men in Vietnam really had to go through so that they could get into character a lot easier. It was about the second or third day in that the cast realized that it was no joke.
1. It was initially banned in Vietnam.
The Vietnamese government didn’t care for the way the Viet Cong were being betrayed and banned the film outright. In 1988 people in Ho Chi Minh City were found watching it anyway on video. No one knows who provided it for them.
Did you happen to know any of these facts?
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